Aditya, I am part of the Experiasphere Google group and Tom Nolle, its founder, is an old acquaintance of mine. However, exactly what he is working on has been a bit of a mystery to me and I have not had the time to investigate and try to understand it fully. From what I can tell, it is a an open source service delivery and orchestration platform that runs concurrently with SDN and/or NVF. There is a powerpoint tutorial you can download on this page, and Tom is working on a video version of the tutorial as well: http://blog.experiasphere.com/?p=87

I'll see if I can grab Tom for an interview and get some more details.

@Marcia, same here, all I can recall is that the project aimed to bring together business like Facebook, Google, etc., and data providers like AT&T, Verizon using SDN/NFV.

On the one hand, I think, projects such as Facebook's internet.org and Google's project loon are great. Because, the internet is a valuable resource that provides the most valuable resource of them all: information. Information can be used to kick start an economy into productivity, or increase the efficiency of an economy, create new business models, and so many things.

On the other hand, Facebook and Google would like 7 billion people connected to the internet, their business model requires scale. And infrastructure is expensive -- connecting 7 billion people is not going to happen unless the economics is right.

Keith Dawson has a good article on this topic on a sister site. Interestingly, the article deals with APIs, PoE, LEDs and Economics, newer technologies rely a lot on its ability to provide saving, hybrid cars are a good example -- the engine is combined with batteries and the differences in miles per gallon by a hybrid car vs. a normal car becomes a strong selling point.

I feel, LEDs are the same, one could say that on average newer LEDs deliver 110lumen/watt, while on average fluorescent bulbs deliver 60lumen/watt, that comes to almost 55 percent better performance. However, due to LEDs being more expensive at the moment, around 8 times the cost of fluorescent bulbs, calculating the breakeven point for ROI becomes important -- an LED over a work desk might breakeven in 3 years' time and the subsequent years providing real savings while, an LED in a supply closet that is only switched on for 10-minutes a day would take decades to break even. To gain an accurate calculation the networks seems like a great place to attach lighting for it to be metered.

Like the hybrid car that combines an engine with batteries, creates an extra layer of complications, so will LEDs on networks create an extra layer of complication. But, if businesses are to be delivered a high level of service -- extra work will be required.

Thanks Brian, that's very illuminating (bad pun intended)! I hadn't even realized there was such a thing as Li-Fi and the potential for lighting on the network. But what you say is so true. We surely need to work out a lot of the complexity issues if we think about what our future networks could possibly transmit.

I clearly need to do more reading in these emerging areas -- can you recommend any resources?

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